Yarx dipped his head, amber eyes solemn. “On my life, my king.”
“Lux Sabers to this door. No one enters without my explicit permission. No one.” Sylas paused at the threshold, looking back at Elsa one final time. She watched him with those pale blue eyes that saw too much, that demanded too much, that had somehow become the center of everything. “I’ll return before dawn.”
Then he was gone, and the hunt began.
The first conspiratordied in the eastern barracks.
Sylas found him packing—frantically stuffing supplies into a satchel, hands shaking, the stink of fear rolling off him in waves. The male had been a quartermaster, responsible for inventory and supply chains. He’d skimmed Moon Tears to fund Vask’s operation, had thought himself clever and hidden and safe in his small corruption.
He looked up when Sylas’s shadow fell across him. His muzzle went pale beneath his fur.
“Alpha King, I can explain—”
Sylas didn’t let him finish.
The second died in the council chambers, still gathering documents she’d thought would protect her. She’d been one of Vask’s informants—feeding him schedules, patrol routes, themovements of the human females. When Sylas found her, she tried to bargain. Tried to offer information he already possessed.
He killed her mid-sentence.
The third fell in the servant tunnels—a young knight who had opened the gate that let Vask’s males slip through. The fourth near the kitchens, where he’d been positioning himself to poison the morning stores. The fifth tried to fight. Sylas appreciated the effort before tearing out his throat.
Sylas moved through his fortress like a shadow with teeth, and the bond pulsed steady in his chest—Elsa’s pain fading as Yarx worked, her fear settling into something calmer. Safer. She was healing. She was protected.
He could hunt.
Blood matted his fur by the time he finished with the sixth. The seventh. The tenth. His claws ached from the work, and something dark and satisfied purred in his chest with each name crossed from his mental list.
This was what he was built for. Not politics. Not compromise. Not the careful dance of court that required him to smile at males who plotted his downfall. This—the hunt, the kill, the cleansing of threats from his territory.
His fortress. His walls. His Elsa.
The thought snagged. Caught.
When had she become that? When had the human pet—the fragile, furless creature who had stumbled into his world through a crash and a curse—become something he would slaughter for? Something he would die for?
The bond hummed in answer, but it gave him no clarity. Only the steady warmth of her presence, distant but real. An anchor in the dark.
He found the eleventh conspirator trying to flee through the winter gardens, footprints stark in the snow. She was a courtier—had smiled at him a hundred times across the throne room,had bowed with perfect grace at every formal function. Tonight, she ran with terror rolling off her in waves.
Sylas caught her at the garden’s edge, where the trees grew thick and dark.
“Please,” she gasped, turning to face him. “I only passed messages. I never wanted anyone hurt—”
“You passed the location of my human females to males who intended to use them as leverage against me.” Sylas’s voice was flat. Empty. The rage had burned through him somewhere around the eighth kill, leaving only cold certainty behind. “You helped Vask orchestrate a breach that let the Fallen into my fortress. People died tonight because of messages you passed.”
She opened her mouth to argue.
He didn’t let her.
The twelfth had barricaded herself in a storage room—as if wood and iron could stop him. Sylas tore through the door like it was paper, and the female beyond screamed as he dragged her into the corridor. She’d been a servant in the kitchens, feeding information about mealtimes and schedules to Vask’s network.
“I have children,” she sobbed. “Please—my children—”
Sylas paused. Something flickered in his chest—not mercy, but calculation. “Your children will be cared for. They’ll never know what you did or how you died.” He leaned closer, letting her see the blood on his fur, the death in his eyes. “That’s more than Vask would have given the humans if he’d succeeded.”
It was quick, at least. He owed her that much.
The thirteenth begged—a council member who had voted in Sylas’s favor a dozen times while feeding intelligence to the priest’s faction. The fourteenth didn’t get the chance to say anything at all.